Sea turtle arts and crafts: Creating income from local women’s traditional embroidery work at Shell Beach, Guyana.

As the Atlantic Ocean waves crash on Guyana’s Shell Beach, a group of schoolchildren and a sea turtle warden roam the wild beaches. They wait under a starry night sky for the evening’s main attraction to emerge. Their eyes widen and all chatter stops as they see the great lumbering form of the most ancient living sea turtle species, the leatherback, emerge. This creature ...

Babuyan Islands humpback whales project.

The Philippines Islands are comprised of more than 7,100 islands in the western Pacific Ocean. This diverse archipelago hosts a spectacular amount of marine and terrestrial biodiversity that is of great interest to the tourism industry. The popularity of the Philippines as a vacation destination has spurred efforts to develop ecotourism across the archipelago. However, promoting the twinned goals of coastal and marine biodiversity conservation and sustainable development present serious challenges for the country.

Mount Cameroon, which rises 4090 meters from the sea, is located on the western coast of Cameroon in the Southwest Province and is considered a ‘hotspot’ of biological diversity. The lower parts of the mountain are covered by dense equatorial rain forest with diverse species of plants ranging from herbs, shrubs and lianas to large timber species, many of which are endemic ...

The wetlands of Dunga on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kenya have fantastic touristic potential. Yet these lands are also rife with conflicts from some of the very animals that make the area so unique. Animals such as the hippopotamus compete with human settlement and often raid and destroy crops, leading to local retaliation. However, solutions to this conflict are beginning, springing up from locally conceived ideas executed in often surprising and creative ...

The Yala swamp sits in the basin of Kenya’s majestic Lake Victoria. Its papyrus wetlands not only support a wealth of biodiversity, but form an economic basis for thousands of Kenyans who make handicrafts from the vital resource. Yet the onslaught of agricultural development threatens to compromise the ecological integrity of Yala by draining crucial habitat for endangered animals and destroying the papyrus cash crop, bringing further ruin to ...

Creating innovative solutions to human-lion conflict

The Tarangire-Manyara ecosystem, (the Maasai steppe), of Tanzania hosts some of the most spectacular carnivore populations on the planet; including lions, hyenas, and leopards. The African lion, emblematic of this ecosystem, is perhaps the most threatened of any other lion population in Tanzania due to retaliatory killings by herders (Kissui, 2007). Yet the Maasai people who share the landscape with this magnificent predator often bear the majority of the costs for its conservation. Foremost among ...

For centuries, thousands of families have depended on the wetland for clean water, fishing, grazing and agricultural land, and the papyrus that they weave into mats, baskets and thatch roofs.

“We worked hard growing maize and bananas, raising cows and bees. I inherited my farm from my father and my forefathers. I have lived here all my life,” “One day I saw surveyors taking measurements on my land, then came the bulldozers. They slashed all my crops and they fenced me ...